The Apartment

The Apartment (1960)

There is a melancholy gulf over the holidays between those who
have someplace to go, and those who do not. “The Apartment” is so affecting
partly because of that buried reason: It takes place on the shortest days of
the year, when dusk falls swiftly and the streets are cold, when after the
office party some people go home to their families and others go home to
apartments where they haven't even bothered to put up a tree. On Christmas Eve,
more than any other night of the year, the lonely person feels robbed of
something that was there in childhood and isn't there anymore.

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Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a definitive lonely guy, in “The
Apartment,” with the ironic twist that he is not even free to go home alone,
because his apartment is usually loaned out to one of the executives at his
company. He has become the landlord for a series of their illicit affairs; they
string him along with hints about raises and promotions. His neighbor Dr.
Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) hears the nightly sounds of passion through the wall
and thinks Baxter is a tireless lover, when in fact Baxter is pacing the
sidewalk out in front, looking up resentfully at his own lighted window.

When Billy Wilder made “The Apartment” in 1960, “the
organization man” was still a current term. One of the opening shots in the
movie shows Baxter as one of a vast horde of wage slaves, working in a room
where the desks line up in parallel rows almost to the vanishing point. This
shot is quoted from King Vidor's silent film “The Crowd” (1928), which is also
about a faceless employee in a heartless corporation. Cubicles would have come
as revolutionary progress in this world.

Baxter has no girlfriend and, apparently, no family. Patted on
the back and called “buddy boy” by the executives who use him, he dreams of a
better job and an office of his own. One day he even gets up his nerve and asks
out one of the elevator girls, Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), but she stands
him up at the last moment because of a crisis in her relationship with the big
boss, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). She thought her affair with Sheldrake was
over, but now apparently it's on again; he keeps talking about divorcing his
wife, but never does.

The screenplay, executed as a precise balance between farce and
sadness, has been constructed by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond to demonstrate that
while Baxter and Miss Kubelik may indeed like each other--may feel genuine
feelings of the sort that lead to true love--they are both slaves to the
company's value system. He wants to be the boss' assistant, she wants to be the
boss' wife, and both of them are so blinded by the concept of “boss” that they
can't see Mr. Sheldrake for an untrustworthy rat.

The movie has been photographed in widescreen black and white.
The b&w dampens down any jollity that might sweep in with the decorations
at the Christmas parties, bars and restaurants where the holidays are in full
swing. And the widescreen emphasizes space that separates the characters, or
surrounds them with emptiness. The design of Baxter's apartment makes his
bedroom door, in the background just to the left of center, a focal point; in
there reside the secrets of his masters, the reasons for his resentments, the
arena for his own lonely slumber, and eventually the stage on which Miss
Kubelik will play out the crucial transition in her life.

Other shots track down Manhattan streets and peer in through
club windows, and isolate Miss Kubelik and the phony-sincere Mr. Sheldrake in
their booth at the Chinese restaurant, where he makes earnest protestations of
his good intentions, and glances uneasily at his watch.

By the time he made “The Apartment,” Wilder had become a master
at a kind of sardonic, satiric comedy that had sadness at its center. "Double Indemnity" (1944) was about a man (MacMurray again) who trusted that one simple
crime would solve his romantic and financial troubles. “Sunset Boulevard” has
William Holden as a paramour to a grotesque aging movie queen (Gloria Swanson),
but there was pathos in the way her former husband (Erich von Stroheim) still
worshiped at the shrine of her faded greatness.

Wilder was fresh off the enormous hit “Some Like It Hot” (1959),
his first collaboration with Lemmon, and Lemmon was headed toward “The Days of
Wine and Roses” (1962), which along with “The Apartment” showed that he could
move from light comedian to tragic everyman. This movie was the summation of
what Wilder had done to date, and the key transition in Lemmon's career.

It was also a key film for Shirley MacLaine, who had been around
for five years in light comedies and had good scenes in “Some Came Running”
(1958) but here emerged as a serious actress who would flower in the 1960s.

What is particularly good about her Miss Kubelik is the way she
doesn't make her a ditzy dame who falls for a smooth talker, but suggests a
young woman who has been lied to before, who has a good heart but finite
patience, who is prepared to make the necessary compromises to be the next Mrs.
Sheldrake. The underlying seriousness of MacLaine's performance helps anchor
the picture--it raises the stakes, and steers it away from any tendency to
become musical beds.

What's particularly perceptive is the way, after her suicide
attempt, she hauls herself together and actually gives Sheldrake another
chance. Like Baxter, she has not been forced into job prostitution, but chosen
it. One of the ways this is an adult picture and not a sitcom is the way it
takes Baxter and Miss Kubelik so long to make the romantic leap; they aren't
deluded fools, but jaded realists who have given up on love and are more
motivated by paychecks. There is a wonderful, wicked, delicacy in the way
Wilder handles the final scene, and finds the right tender-tough note in the
last lines of the screenplay. (“Shut up and deal” would become almost as famous
as “nobody's perfect,” the immortal closing lines of “Some Like it Hot.”)

As it happened, I watched “The Apartment” not long after Jack
Lemmon's death, and looked at Blake Edwards' “The Days of Wine and Roses”
(1962) and James Foley's “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992) at the same time. The
side-by-side viewings were an insight into Lemmon's acting, and into changing
styles in movies. “The Days of Wine and Roses” has dated, in my opinion; the
famous greenhouse scene looks more like overacting than alcoholism. Wilder's “The
Lost Weekend” (1945) was made 17 years earlier but feels more contemporary in
his treatment of alcoholism. “Glengarry Glen Ross” contains probably Lemmon's
best performance. His aging, desperate real estate salesman is deserving of
comparison with anyone's performance of Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,”
and it is interesting how Lemmon, who famously began with directors asking him
to dial down and give “a little less,” was able here to hit the precise tones
needed for the David Mamet dialogue, which is realism cloaked in mannerism.

In observing that “The Lost Weekend” hasn't dated, I could be
making a comment about Wilder's work in general. Even a lightweight romantic
comedy like “Sabrina” (1954) holds up better than its 1990s remake, and the
great Wilder pictures don't play as period pieces but look us straight in the
eye. “Some Like It Hot” is still funny, “Sunset Boulevard” is still a masterful
gothic character comedy, and “The Apartment” is still tougher and more poignant
than the material might have permitted. The valuable element in Wilder is his
adult sensibility; his characters can't take flight with formula plots, because
they are weighted down with the trials and responsibilities of working for a
living. In many movies, the characters hardly even seem to have jobs, but in “The
Apartment” they have to be reminded that they have anything else.

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